Discussions on building a new custom home as well as remodeling or fixing an old one.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

A floor plan that's close enough to bid

After several rounds of redesign with our architect, we've finally got a plan that's close enough to what we want that we can send it to our builder to get a reasonably accurate cost estimate. That's been our goal through the last couple months of meetings with the architect--not to get a final plan, per se, but to get something that was close enough that we could give to our builder so that he could give us a reasonably accurate price. Once we have that, we'll know whether we can run with this plan, or whether we have to readjust things to reduce the cost.
The last time we spoke with our builder, he looked at my sketches & dimensions and gave us a rough guestimate that was way over our budget. The problem was that this was only a rough guess, with a pretty wide window of ambiguity. Maybe it was under our budget, and maybe it wasn't. The ambiguity was killing us, and we felt like we were wasting time trying to shrink the plan without knowing whether that was really necessary.

Anyway, we've now got some official drawings that are pretty close to what I originally drew up. There are still some things I don't like about it, but that's the nature of the beast. No house will be perfect, even with an unlimited budget, because some things on our wish list are mutually exclusive.

The plans are now in the builder's hands, and he's getting bids on the job. Hopefully, we'll have have some numbers from him in a few weeks so that we know how to proceed.